Marian Tomko: why accounting should stop being just accounting

Marian Tomko, founder of the Czech scaleup DYPE, believes the classic accounting model — where firms bill for a completed task or hours spent — is becoming obsolete. The market now demands both technological speed and human accountability, and it is precisely at that intersection that DYPE has built its business, serving more than 150 startups and scaleups.

DYPE's clients include well-known Czech tech companies FaceUp, FlowPay and CloudTalk. They move onto DYPE's infrastructure at the point when their old accounting systems can no longer keep up with rapid growth, international expansion or complex financial tasks that go beyond a single discipline.

According to Tomko, the main weakness of the traditional accounting-services model is that a specialist can be excellent at bookkeeping, taxes and regulations, yet that is no longer enough for the management of a fast-growing company. “Understanding debits and credits isn’t enough. You need to understand why customers buy the product, what actually drives profitability, or how the company’s business model works,” says the DYPE founder.

That is why DYPE positions itself not as a traditional accounting firm but as a tech-enabled service provider — essentially a comprehensive outsourced finance department for its clients, including companies from the Deloitte Fast 50 ranking. DYPE itself has been growing continuously for seven years running.

Interestingly, Tomko never originally planned to go into accounting. His career path ran in the opposite direction — from the global corporation PwC through smaller firms, including BDO and Bohemia Interactive Solutions, down to small local startups. That journey let him see how a company’s financial-management needs change along with its size and growth speed.

Tomko originally wanted to build a data-science project focused on big-data analytics, but ran into an unexpected problem: “Large companies don’t have big data, they have big trash,” he jokes. Before you can build analytics and forecasts on data, you first need to put the financial foundation of the business in order. That is how DYPE was born in 2020, combining technology with the missing financial layer.

One example of a successful move to DYPE's infrastructure is the global tech platform Apify — automating accounting processes allowed it to shorten the preparation of management reports from the 30th of the month to the 10th. Europe's largest mixed martial arts organization, Oktagon MMA, underwent a similar modernization.